Seth Godin’s marketing pyramid: fix the foundations before more ads
More enquiries will not repair a confusing onboarding process. Before increasing acquisition activity, examine what happens to the customers you already win.
Find the weakest part of the customer journey before choosing the next marketing tactic.
What the pyramid changes about the discussion
Godin puts intention and the audience beneath retention, remarkability, permission and the visible tactics of marketing. The useful challenge for an owner is to examine what supports a campaign. Here we turn that challenge into an original diagnostic for a service business.
Do not assume that the lowest-looking layer is always the cause of a poor result. Gather evidence. A delivery problem, an unclear offer and a seasonal fall in demand can produce similar-looking revenue figures while requiring different decisions.
Draw the actual customer journey
Choose one offer and follow the customer from first contact to delivery and renewal. Write what they expect at each stage, who owns the handoff and where you have evidence of friction. Use support notes, customer interviews and operational data where available.
For a fictional membership business, the important gap might be between payment and the first useful session. The advertising promise is clear and sign-ups arrive, but new members cannot easily choose where to start. Another campaign adds more people to the same confusing experience.
An appropriate first intervention could be a clearer welcome path and a short choice of starting activities. That is a hypothesis to test, not a guaranteed retention improvement. Define what you expect to observe before changing it.
Read a small cohort honestly
Imagine 100 customers begin a subscription and 30 stop within the first month. Before announcing a churn crisis or a marketing success, check whether the subscriptions, dates and cancellation reasons are comparable. Some may have intended to buy only one month.
Speak to people with different outcomes: those who stayed, those who left and those who barely used the service. Ask what they expected and what actually happened. Do not select only the most flattering feedback for the review.
If the records are incomplete, say so. A small, accurate set of observations is more useful than a polished dashboard with undefined metrics. The example numbers are illustrative and do not describe NEXT MBA performance.
Choose one repair and one measure
An onboarding repair might be judged by whether new customers complete a first useful action. A service-scope repair might be judged by fewer misunderstandings in handoff notes. A renewal intervention might be judged over a longer period than a single campaign week.
Write the owner, the change, the measurement period and the conditions that would make you stop or revise it. Keep other changes limited where practical so that you can interpret what happened. For a low-volume business, combine numerical evidence with careful conversation notes.
Return to acquisition with a clearer promise
Once you understand the journey, your next campaign can describe an experience you can actually support. It may need a different audience, stronger proof or simply more accurate wording.
This does not mean all advertising must stop until the product is perfect. It means investment decisions should include what happens after the click. Review customer delivery and marketing together, so that the promise and the experience remain connected.
Try it in your business
Map five customer touchpoints for one offer. Mark each with evidence you have, evidence you lack and a named owner. Select one friction point and write a testable improvement. Decide how you will check it before increasing the campaign budget.
Sources & editorial note
- Seth Godin: The pyramid of modern marketing
NEXT MBA editorial analysis, prepared with AI assistance from the public sources above. The applications, scenarios and exercises are NEXT MBA examples, not quotations or transcripts. Product recommendations are ours; they do not imply the speaker’s endorsement of those products. Sources checked on 1 October 2026.